Peter Clark

Working Notes

These working notes are unpublished documents, giving informal summaries and discussions of various research issues. They are pre-publication material and of varying quality, and some of the ideas have since been superceded. A brief description of their contents is given below.

• 44. Interpreting and Reasoning with Simple Natural Language Sentences

  2014A discussion on how generic sentences can be interpreted and reasoned with.

• 43. Project Halo: Making Sense of Questions in a Knowledge-Rich Environment

  2011Invited presentation at the DARPA Machine Reading Year Three Kickoff Meeting.

• 42. Creating BLUE Formulations of the Refinement Phase Test Suite (RTS) Questions: Experience and Reflections

  2010We spent three months adding biology and lexical knowledge so that AURA could answer a test suite of fluently worded English questions. This document summarizes this experience, and its implications for future QA work with AURA.

• 41. Query Relaxation in AURA

  2010An intermediate reflection on the possible roles of query relaxation in AURA's QA module.

• 40. A Brief Overview of Some Datapoints in the Query Relaxation Literature

  2009A short literature survey of the main themes in this area in the database literature.

• 39. RTE5: An Informal Analysis of Some Interesting Textual Entailment Examples

  2010A fairly informal discussion of what it would take to infer a hypothesis H from a text T for some selected RTE5 examples, using lexical and world knowledge (as opposed to shallow, statistical matching techniques).

• 38. The KM to SILK Translator - Preliminary Design and Implementation

  2010A technical discussion of how to convert KM's prototypes, as build by knowledge engineers using the AURA system, into the F-Logic-like language SILK.Examples Used in Working Note | PowerPoint Overview | Lisp Implementation

• 37. Evaluation of the New Paraphrase and Question Formulation Capability in AURA

  2010A description of recent developments in AURA's question-answering capabilities.

• 36. The Semantics of Questions

  2010A discussion of the formal semantics of some of the questions posed to AURA, with particular focus on the relationship between universals and hypotheticals.

• 35. BLUE (Boeing Language Understanding Engine): A Quick Tutorial on How it Works

  2009A short and sweet PowerPoint summaryAlso see the technical paper Boeing's NLP System and the Challenges of Semantic Representation, for longer discussion and illustrations

• 34.On the Relation between "Semantically Tractable" Queries and AURA's Question Formulation Facility

  2009A discussion of Popescu et al's notion of "semantically tractable" questions in natural language interfaces to databases, and the extent to which it can be applied to asking questions in the AURA system.

• 33. A Study of Some "Hard to Formulate" Biology Questions

  2009An analysis of 22 biology questions that the users had trouble expressing in our controlled language CPL in the AURA system.

• 32. Why is it Hard to Understand Original English Questions?

  2009The AURA knowledge-based system currently requires users to reformulate questions in a simplified version of English called CPL. This document discusses some of the obstacles to having AURA understand the original English questions directly.

• 31. On the Relationship of AURA Question-Answering and Textual Entailment

  2009How question-answering in a textbook-derived knowledge-based system and the Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) challenge are closely related.

• 30. Using Scripts to help in Biomedical Text Interpretation

  2009A worked example of how general knowledge of transportation can be used to guide interpretation of biomedical text.

• 29. The Problem of Unrealized Complements and its Relation to Frames and Scripts

  2008A short discussion of the issues in, and solutions to, the problem of "missing" (unstated) elements in text.

• 28. Do Scripts Solve NLP?

  2008A discussion on the use of scripts to understand the MUC-3 kidnapping articles.

• 27. Representing "improvement": A Short Study on an RTE Example

  2007A discussion on how to represent the notion of "improve" and "better", set in the context of language processing (textual entailment).

• 26. Making Sense of Sentences

  2001ome examples of trying to align variations of an input sentence with background knowledge.

• 25. Reference Resolution and Views

  2001How background knowledge might be used to resolve indirect references in text.

• 24. From Natural Language to KM Representations

  2001Some extremely preliminary thoughts.The toy demo code is also available here.

• 23. Concept Variation and Example Generation: Some Preliminary Thoughts

  2001This little working note presents some brief thoughts on handling variation among members of a concept, and generating examples of that concept.

• 22. More Thoughts on Views

  2001Some further, assorted thoughts on the notion of `views' in a KB. Co-authored with John Thompson and the UT KB group.

• 21. A Proposal for a Process Specification Language

  2001Co-authored with John Thompson. Presents some key concepts and examples for representing processes and their executions in KM.

• 20. Understanding Role Concepts

  2000This note gives a new discussion of role concepts, superceding the earlier (and in places erroneous) Working Note number 11. This working note is currently being revised and will appear shortly.

• 19. Using Views in a Knowledge Base

  2000Discusses the notion of "views", namely explicit representations of how general concepts can be applied to more domain-specific concepts. Co-authored with John Thompson, Ken Barker, James Fan, Bruce Porter, Dan Tecuci, Peter Yeh.

• 18. Constructing Scripts Compositionally: A Molecular Biology Example

  2000This note follows on from Working Note 17, to provide another example (with less discussion), this one from the molecular biology domain about how a virus works.KM KBs: Classes, Prototypes | Graphlet Database

• 17. $RESTAURANT re-visited: A KM Implementation of a Compositional Approach

  2000 A worked KM example of a familiar AI problem. This paper also compares class-based and prototype-based styles in KM.KM KBs: Classes, Prototypes | Graphlet Database

• 16. Translating from CCALC into KM: An Example

  1999Comparison of two representation languages, CCALC and KM, for a simple problem. Co-authored with Joohyung Lee, Vladimir Lifschitz, and Bruce Porter.

• 15. From Text to Paragraph Representations

  1999A discussion of the gap between NLP-generated semantic graphs, and a fuller representation of meaning, for a short paragraph of text.

• 14. Story Generation and Aviation Incident Representation

  1999Discusses the representation and generation of aviation incident 'stories'.Prolog Code

• 13. Knowledge Patterns

  1998A discussion of components as theory 'patterns' or 'templates', which get instantiated ('morphed') in various ways for reasoning.

• 12. More on Components

  1998A more detailed discussion of component data-structures and composition.

• 11. Should Role Concepts be Included in a Taxonomy?

  1998A brief discussion of how to place `role concepts' (eg. Teacher, Producer) in a taxonomy.

• 10. Requirements for a Knowledge Representation System

  1996An attempt to enumerate general requirements for a KR system, with some example representational challenges.

• 9. Representing Conceptual Graphs in Algernon

  1996A discussion of conceptual graphs, and how they might be represented in the KR language Algernon.

• 8. The Help-Desk Assistant Project

  1996A pictorial overview of the DCE Help-Desk Project. (0.8MB compressed, uncompresses to 26MB due to color images).

• 7. Object Descriptions Revisited

  1995A view of components as a self-contained system of relationships, with a clearer delineation. Also see the AAAI'97 paper for the evolution of this theme.

• 6. Constructing Scripts from Components

  1995Describes representing stereotypical action sequences (`scripts') compositionally, employing ideas from Batory's GenVoca approach to software composition.

• 5. KI Revisited

  1995An overview and discussion of Ken Murray's KI system for Knowledge Integration.

• 4. Building Action Descriptions from Components

  1995Describes representing STRIPS-style actions compositionally.

• 3. Concept Construction as Constraint Relaxation

  1995Thoughts on dealing with contradictions between components during composition.LIFE Code

• 2. Components and Contexts

  1995An exporation of connections between the idea of components, contexts, composition, and problem-solving.

• 1. Building Concepts from Components

  1994Initial thoughts on representations as compositions, visualized as graph superposition.